God-free living in a God-heavy world

Category Archives: Religious nutjobs

The Texas Freedom Network had a post about our dear creationist friend today as well. In the comments, someone who has spoken with Dr. Shormann previously had this to say:

I got into a comment exchange with Shormann when his fellow creationist and preacher pal, Marty, was running for [State Board of Education] (and won, dagnabbit!) and without a doubt Shormann is among the most dishonest creationists I’ve run across in decades of following these creeps.

I even pulled up a paper he wrote studying the Brazos river for his PhD because it conflicted with his childish false dichotomy of “historical versus experimental” science. I pointed out that a plot he published, pretty much a straight line, indicated that the river would have had a certain temperature even thought they didn’t have a measurement for that year and he replied, “We can never know because we can’t go back in time” or some such BS.

And Dr. Shormann continues to play innocent on his blog, pretending to be puzzled that I say he’s deceptive. Actually… you know what? I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he just isn’t rational enough to realize that he’s being deceptive.

Hi Mike,I would encourage you to read the paper yourself, rather than base your conclusions on what somebody else said. The paper was received by Aquatic Geochemistry 8/23/11, accepted on 12/29/11, and published in 2012. It says this right at the top of the paper, read it here:http://hypoxia.tamu.edu/files/2012_dimarco.pdf

As far as funding, I payed for some of the gas and food for my boat, TAMU paid for the rest. About half of the data from the August 2007 trip to the Brazos River plume was collected off my boat. My crew consisted of a TAMU oceanographer and several homeschool students, who went on to present their research at the Science and Engineering Fair of Houston.

Here’s more info on the funding sources, copied directly from the acknowledgements: “This research was supported by a Rapid Response Award by Texas Sea Grant College Program (No. 404538). Partial funding was through a grant to S. DiMarco (NOAA-CSCOR NA06NOS4780198), contribution number NGOMEX-132, and the TAMU Department of Oceanography.Support for the stable isotope analyses was provided by a grant from Texas’ Norman Hackerman Advanced Research Program (No. 010366-0053-2007).”

Mike, please explain where I was lying. Also, do you have a science degree?

Oh, how cute.

Mike, please explain where I was lying.

That’s easy: right about where he said “my most recent work was in 2012 (Texas Coastal Hypoxia Linked to Brazos River Discharge as Revealed by Oxygen Isotopes).” The paper does not represent any research he did, but rather the work of a team. “The data was collected off my boat” and “my crew collected the data” does not equal “I did the research outlined in this paper.”

Note to Dr. Shormann: if you don’t want to be seen as dishonest, the proper way to respond to someone’s incorrect claims is to actually respond to them, not delete their post and make it look like it never existed.

And what do my scientific qualifications have anything to do with him being deceptive? Talk about a red herring. I don’t need to be a scientist to know that his only contribution to that paper was facilitation, not research.

Fascinating and terrifying stuff: “Can Religion Justify Bullying Children?” (a talk by Sean Faircloth.) If you’ve got a spare half hour or so, I highly recommend giving this a watch. Never let it be said that fundamentalist Christianity isn’t a threat to nonbelievers or believers of other stripes.

I originally wrote this response in an e-mail to the opinion editor of that newspaper, but it’s been a couple of weeks now, and I haven’t heard back from them about whether or not it’d be published. So what the hell? Let’s publish it here.

Early last month, PZ Myers over at Pharyngula posted a link to a survey by a radical anti-gay group (maybe it’s just a single person? I can’t tell) asking silly questions about whether the government should force companies to hire gay people, and things like that. To fill out the survey, you had to enter an e-mail address, so I put in one of my throwaway ones in the hope that I’d get some entertainment out of the things they send to their mailing list.